Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
WAR AS TOURISM
ANZAC Day is celebrated this
week, and I have been priming myself to write a long polemic on why I have such
mixed feelings about this particular celebration, even if I think it is right
and proper that a country should honour its war dead. But I’ve decided to save
that long polemic for another day. Instead, let me strike out on another theme,
inspired by a passage from Wyndham Lewis’s memoir Blasting and Bombardiering.
After he has been describing
the scene of desolation as he saw it on the battlefield, Lewis reminds readers
that it is what the soldier feels, and the immanent threat of death,
that really makes the landscape one of desolation; and that therefore attempts
to depict or reconstruct it are distortions:
“To make a reconstruction of this landscape for a millionaire-sightseer,
say, would be impossible. The sightseer would be the difficulty – for the
reasons I have already given in my dissection of romance. This is a museum of
sensations, not a collection of objects. For your reconstruction you would have
to admit Death there as well, and he would never put in an appearance, upon
those terms. You would have to line the trenches with bodies, guaranteed
freshly killed that morning. No hospital could provide it. And unless people
were mad they would not want – apart from the cost – to assemble the necessary
ordinance, the engines required for this stunt of landscape-gardening. – Except
that they were made, they would not have wanted ever to assemble it.” (Wyndham Lewis Blasting and Bombardiering, Part Three, Chapter Four)
I’ve thought about this
passage quite a lot recently, as we appear to be in an age of affluent
sightseers who go off to look at old battlefields. This is especially true as
the tourist industry feeds off the centenary of the First World War.
What are we attempting to
capture at such sites? Are we remembering the dead with sorrow or respect? Or
is it simply another tourist “experience”?
When I hear of the increasing
numbers of young Australians and New
Zealanders who go off to Anzac Cove at Gallipoli, for the annual commemoration,
I might for a split second think as some wishful-thinking editorialists have,
and imagine that this shows a growing interest in our history. But then I hear
of the controversy over whether or not an Australian rock-band should play for
the young visitors, and I know that this is just another entertainment, to be
bracketed with the Munich October Fest or the running-of-the-bulls at Pamplona
as part of what young Kiwis and Aussies do in their international holiday time.
I also consider how little
there is of war to be seen at such sites. As I noted in an earlier posting [look up What Passing Bells? on the index at right] I was in Flanders,
with some of my family, on Anzac Day last year [2014]. I went to an Australian-and-New
Zealand ceremony, under light drizzle, at the British cemetery at Polygon Wood.
I visited the well-maintained and reconstructed town of Messines, so tidy and
neat that one would imagine no war had ever touched it, with its new statue of
a New Zealand soldier in the main square. And I went to a specifically New
Zealand ceremony on Messines Ridge. It was here in particular that I thought
how impossible it really is to reconstruct war, even on the site of a
century-old battle. Look across the very gently rolling Flemish countryside,
and you would imagine that nothing had ever happened here, apart from centuries
of peaceful farming.
And what if, for the
tourists, somebody was to reconstruct dugouts and trenches here, complete with
barbed wire and old ordinance? Such abominations have been set up on other old
battled fields.
Frankly, I think it would be
a mockery – a sanitised version of whatever it was that soldiers once experienced
there, and less of a true memorial than the peaceful farmland telling us that
war should be seen as an aberration.
Once upon a time, civilian
spectators sat on nearby hillsides to watch the clash of armies. This was in
the age before high-explosive shells had been invented, and before wars had
become “total”. War could then be a spectator sport. But it hasn’t been that
way at least since 1914, and tourism should not incline people to see it as a
spectacle now.
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